January 20, 2011

The Pittsburgh CocoaHeads (where it all started) are going to be working through the new edition of the Dave Mark / Jeff Lamarche / Jack Nutting iPhone book as a group (ebook available today! woo!). Our regular monthly meetings will have a kick-off presentation on what to expect the next month. We figure a chapter a week is a good pace for folks with busy lifestyles.

A couple of us are making ourselves available for “office hours” if folks have questions / get stuck. Huge gumption traps for beginners are compiler errors and basic memory management, things that programmers with more experience can just glance at and know exactly what’s wrong. We’re hoping this solves the “stall-out half-way through” problem many people have picking up new technology as a hobby.

I had the pleasure of being the Tech Reviewer for this updated edition of Beginning iPhone4 Development. There’s a lot of good cool new stuff in there. During the course of discussions with Apress about acquiring the book in time for our launch, they’ve made a CocoaHeads discount code good for 25% off Mac/Phone ebook titles until the end of March : APRESSCOCOAHEADS2011, when you get it from the Apress store. There’s also a discount for folks who already have the iPhone3 version of the book, but I don’t know if they stack.

More info is available at http://bit.ly/pgh-iphone, especially if you’re in the Pittsburgh area. Come join us! Folks outside of Pittsburgh are welcome to do the same thing. Feel free to use the monthly kick-off slides, which I’ll be putting up at http://borkware.com/cocoaheads as we progress into the year.